…alibi-ya provide women in the…sex industry with a reputable but totally fictitious identity…[using] things like fake business cards, references and employment certificates…[and] even…fake [bosses] for birthday speeches and other family events…Shintaro Sakamoto runs an alibi-ya in Tokyo. “We provide assistance to mainly hostesses and prostitutes,” he said. “We help them to rent apartments, and we help them get their kids into nursery schools”…[if] parents ring the office their daughter supposedly works at, the alibi-ya will be ready with the deception, explaining their daughter is in a meeting and will call back shortly. The alibi-ya will then ring the woman’s mobile and tell her to call home. Even the caller ID is fixed so it looks like the woman is calling from the landline in her fake office. There is nothing illegal about the service…

Louise and Martine Fokkens are 69-year-old identical twins in Amsterdam who have worked as whores since the age of 19, owned their own brothel for a time and set up the first trade union for prostitutes. A new documentary, Meet the Fokkens, looks at the colorful lives of these very unconventional ladies.

I only wish lunacy like this was confined to Sweden; unfortunately, it happens all over the West now:

…Simon Lundström was convicted of possessing child pornography…despite the fact the “manga images” used to convict him featured no real children…The punishment Lundström faces is relatively minor – a fine of around $780…but…still marks him as a sex offender…[plus he lost] his job [as a manga translator and]…can no longer offer his services as a “manga expert”…the prosecution…argued that the images could be used to entice children…and even went as far as to suggest the artists…could have used real children as models…

The city administrative officer has asked for a 90-day extension…[citing] “complexities”…In recent weeks the…panel has heard from a contingent of vocal…industry officials who say the ordinance is faulty and unneeded…adult industry attorney…Allan Gelbard…[said] the…extension may give the panel more time to logically think things through. “Perhaps, if they take a more thorough look at the constitutional issues involved…they will realize what a mistake…this ordinance truly was”…

Sixty percent of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 may not truly understand how proper use of contraception can prevent pregnancy, according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, which reports abstinence-only sex education may be leaving young adults with a subpar understanding of sexual health. Forty percent of respondents…said birth control was not important because “when it is your time to get pregnant, it will happen”…Although…69 percent of women and almost half of the men… agreed they were “committed to avoiding pregnancy,” they seemed to question whether contraceptive devices such as condoms or birth control pills were an effective way to achieve that goal…

…according to a study…in the…journal Pediatrics…young adults who listen to…music…with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot…And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender. These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students…in the Netherlands…[who] ranged in age from 15 to 25…Risky music-listening behavior was defined as listening to music at 89 dBA for at least an hour per day…That music exposure can cause noise-induced hearing loss…[and] “increased feelings of isolation, depression, loneliness, anger, and fear”…But that’s not where the health risks end. The researchers found that…those who put themselves at risk…were:

* 1.99 times more likely to [have] used cannabis in the last four weeks;
* 1.19 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily; and
* 1.10 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time.

…those who put themselves at risk by attending noisy concerts and clubs were:

* 5.94 times more likely to have consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at some point in the last four weeks;
* 2.03 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time; and
* 1.12 times more likely to smoke cigarettes every day.

…The researchers…say…public health officials…could design practical interventions, such as handing out condoms along with earplugs at concert venues, or by printing messages about alcohol abuse on concert ticket stubs…

Remember, kids, rock and roll is dangerous! But at least it can’t make you as clueless as people who actually get paid to write rubbish like this, or who publish articles about adult behavior in a magazine for pediatricians.

Is there a New York Times columnist as insufferably moralistic, or as neglectful of facts that contradict his argument, as Nicholas Kristof? Last week Kristof mounted yet another of his high-horse save-the-children campaigns, this time against…Anheuser-Busch. Kristof asks readers to join his boycott of the leading brewer for…permitting its output to be sold…just across the state line from the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Though notionally dry, the reservation is in practice wracked with alcoholism…Unlike Kristof’s column and blog post, the Times‘ earlier reporting on the dispute at least makes a few concessions about how the tribe’s alcoholism…has more complicated origins than [a new] lawsuit would make it seem. For example, it quotes Oglala members who say the unusual Pine Ridge policy of complete alcohol prohibition…has been a failure…Kristof by contrast appears to have swallowed the lawsuit’s contentions in one hearty draft…

Olson goes on to point out that under Nebraska law, brewers have no control over distribution of their product by state-licensed wholesalers; in other words Anheuser-Busch couldn’t stop beer from being sold near the reservation even if it shared Kristof’s belief that “enlightened” white people should “protect” childlike non-whites from their own choices.

Three Drug Enforcement Administration agents are under investigation for allegedly hiring prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia…Sen. Susan Collins…[said] “It’s disturbing that we may be uncovering a troubling culture that spans more than one law enforcement agency…the evidence…indicates that this likely was not just a one-time incident”…

Amanda Brooks has a knack for discovering oddities like “Fake Internet Girlfriend”, which describes itself as “a service that allows our clients to discreet [sic] employ real females to pretend to be their girlfriend online and communicate with them as if they were dating the person on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter or in some cases in gaming communities like World of Warcraft.” So if it’s more important to you to look like you have a girlfriend than to just use that money to actually have sex (which could potentially relax you enough that you might actually attract a real girlfriend), this is for you. Of course they insist that they aren’t an escort service, and I‘ll grant that…but honestly, isn’t this on the periphery of sex work? It’s not at all unusual for a client to pay a girl just to have someone to talk to or to be seen with in public, with no sex involved; is this so different?

…Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas…is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone…“It’s simply not appropriate to use any of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” [said] Catherine Crump [of the ACLU]…“An officer at a remote location…[Tasing or targeting] people…[could be considered] unconstitutional force…”

In this article I also pointed out that the practice of young female gang members contributing to gang finances via prostitution is now being called “sex trafficking”, and as Emi Koyama explained in a recent post about a public forum on the topic, the government recognizes the truth:

…a [government] representative…was invited to make a statement, which she was completely unprepared for…she slipped the information that confirmed what many activists knew was the case but most government experts were smart enough to conceal: that the U.S. Attorney’s Office views domestic minor sex trafficking as “primarily gang-related,” and has moved the issue to its “gang unit”; transnational human trafficking on the other hand was moved to the civil rights unit…human trafficking is becoming yet another way for young men of color to be criminalized and imprisoned…

Metaupdates

The Executive Director of…Rights Not Rescue, Nicodemus ‘Mama Africa’ Aochamub says…”we are thankful that Kazenambo Kazenambo [a government minister who called for legalization of sex work] is brave to stand up for us, but we…prefer that sex work be decriminalised…With legalising, we will work under municipal laws such as registration…red-light districts and [forced]…medical checks [and] identification cards…Time has come for sex work to be regarded like any other employment”…

…last week several men were convicted for what Swedish prosecutors have called one of the largest trafficking rings of its kind…You can read…about it here, here and here…but there are a couple things…worth drawing attention to. The first is…[that “there was no lack of buyers”]…one of the women…[said] she had seven or eight customers on her very first night. This doesn’t say much for the supposed deterrent effect of the sex purchase ban. The second is the breakdown of [clients’] ages…36% were born in the 1960s, 21% in the 1970s and 30% in the 1980s…nearly a third…were teenagers when the ban was introduced in 1999: further evidence (as I discussed here) that it hasn’t had the normative effect it was supposed to have on younger men. The 17-year-old’s conviction is interesting for another reason…Sweden’s age of majority is 18, which means that he is legally still a child…The ideology underlying the sex purchase ban is that women cannot choose to sell sex; evidently, however, Swedish law considers that male children…can choose to buy it. In other words, when it comes to trading sex for money, adult women are less competent than male children. Could there be any clearer illustration of how this law infantilises women?

One Year Ago Today

“Chupacabra” compares the truth about pimps to their oversized legend.

25 Responses

LMFAO at the Fokkens! I really tore my gut laughing at that. First thing you see in the video is “Submarine Presents” … and I’m like … “oh shit this will be good”. Then it’s two very elderly and happy hookers! And the reason that’s funny to me is because I can tell you that most of those women’s clients are submariners from around the world. They’re exactly the kind of girls my buddies would have sought out just to say “I climbed that mountain bro!” 😀

Nick Kristoff – he may have “jumped the shark” here and it may be all down hill from here for the homeboy. He will be sorely missed. Thanks for your service Nick.

I’m sure you saw what Charles Krauthammer had to say about domestic drones …

“I’m going to go hard left on you here. I’m going to go ACLU,” Krauthammer said in the show. “I don’t want regulations. I don’t want restrictions. I want a ban on this.”

Krauthammer explains that he considers drones “instruments of war” and cites the Founder’s aversion to such instruments maintaining a presence inside the United States. He compares a drone to a high-tech version of an old army and a musket.

You know what’s funny to me? With all the high-tech surveillance and 24 hour video the Cops have access to – they still continue to bring drug cases to juries with not much more than circumstantial evidence and Cop testimony.

The alibi-ya service with the re-routed telephone calls reminds me of the True Lies movie, with Arnie as a secret agent with a cover as a Computer Software salesman. Arnie would also fell right at home in a world with killer drones.

Arnold is getting “payback” now in his new movie … “The Tomb” … which is shooting now at NASA (Michoud) in New Orleans. He’s playing a cyberterrorist who’s been locked up in a terrible and inescapable prison with sadistic “ninja guards” that like to abuse him. I’m playing one of the guards. Go to YouTube and search “E Entertainment The Tomb” to see the first on-set interviews. 😀

Pyrrhic Victory – Facial recognition software is already in use, so, drone + rubber bullets + facial recognition, and you have an autonomous hunter robot which will fly around looking for “wanted” criminals. The Terminator is getting closer by the minute.

>”…Simon Lundström was convicted of possessing child pornography…despite the fact the “manga images” used to convict him featured no real children…”

I’ve wondered about this. I draw comics as a hobby, the stories usually based on things that have happened to me, or people I’ve known, names changed to protect the guilty.

I thought the who concept of prosecuting underage porn was to protect children and young people. I’m in favor of that. But in comics, there are no actual, real people. It’s ink on paper. (Or now days, often pixels on a screen.) To what possible purpose is prosecuting someone for possessing drawn images?

The excuse: Humans are mindless machines, like computers to be programmed, so even drawings or stories of sex with people one nanosecond under 18 “creates a demand”, essentially turning people who had no interest in sex with the underage into slavering pedophiles who will rape newborns. The material must therefore be ruthlessly suppressed to “protect children”, and its draconian excesses are justified because anything is OK “if it protects even ONE CHILD!!!!!!!!11!!1!!eleven!!!”

The real reason: The same reason that all tyrannical states pick victims to torture essentially at random: to inspire terror in the populace.

Oh, that’s not a modern thing: “When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.” – Plato

It is entirely possible to point out how capitalists have, sometimes, been horrible without automatically saying “but communism is wonderful.” Those who strongly identify as either pro-capitalist or anti-communist often hear that at the end of the statement, whether it’s there or not.

I have, after pointing out how official state religions have so often lead to atrocities, had people come utterly unglued as they refuted the pro-forced-atheism, Soviet-style tyranny that I had not even suggested, much less demanded.

What I hate about the “capitalism is the root of all evil” screed is the same exact thing I hate about gun control, censorship and drug prohibition: the pretense that a thing (physical or ephemeral) without sentience can be “evil”. In my D&D games I sometimes featured evil objects, but those games also feature magic, demons, etc; they’re not real. In real life only sentient beings (which in our present experience means humans alone) can be responsible for evil, and ANY object or philosophy can be turned to evil if a human so chooses. My preference for one philosophy over another is that collectivist philosophies, by teaching that groups have the right to impose themselves on individuals or minority groups, aid and abet evil more efficiently and pervasively than those which recognize that individuals have inalienable rights, in other words rights which cannot morally be eradicated by groups no matter how inconvenient they are to the leaders’ schemes.

I will agree that an object cannot be intrinsically evil. Some objects can be powerful, and thus an evil person with such an object can do more evil than if he did not have it. The issue then becomes how powerful an item is too powerful to take the chance? Most people will agree that people should not be prohibited from owning belts just because it’s possible to strangle somebody with a belt. Most people will agree that people should not be owning atomic bombs, even though some people might be that trustworthy.

So where, between belts on one side and nukes on the other, do we draw a line? Handguns? Nunchaku? Machine guns? Curare and blowguns? Well that’s what we argue about.

I’m not sure I’m with you when it comes to philosophies. I do agree that any philosophy can be perverted, and some seem to be more easily perverted than others. But it seems that some philosophies, even if followed faithfully, will do great evil.

>…alibi-ya provide women in the…sex industry with a reputable but totally fictitious identity…[using] things like fake business cards, references and employment certificates…[and] even…fake [bosses] for birthday speeches and other family events…

The loli and shota manga images could be used by pedophiles to entice children, and therefore must be banned? Well OK, but the traditional method of enticing children is with candy.
I hereby demand that all manufacturers of candy be arrested.

I’m a bit more worried about myself. In the last couple of months, I’ve started listening to music with ear buds. So now I’m 1.1 times as likely to do something bad. 1.1 times!!! Is there any hope for me at all?

Yes, armed drones are instruments of war. I can understand using them for a specific purpose (“the bank robbers are holed up here, they have the hostage here, time to send in the drone”), but for regular patrol? No, no, no, please. If we are to live under martial law, they should at least declare it. No, no, no, please.

How long until we find out the shocking truth: that the child traffickers are Satanists who are breeding their child sex slaves in day care centers?

Ok, thinking back to myself as a child… Had someone shown me any of that manga, I’d have probably just said “Ewwww… Manky!” and truned my attention elsewhere. I really felt that way, in my teen years, about so much of R. Crumb’s work. It certainly wouldn’t have enticed me.

SB, don’t sweat it. I’ve been using earbuds since the mid-eighties. I remember listening to Phil Collin’s “No Jacket Required” when it first came out through a waterproof cassette Sony “Walkman”. Why waterproof? Because I was on a submarine! LOL – dumbass me never figured that if water started coming into the boat, I’d have bigger problems than losing a Walkman!!

That was 1985. I don’t smoke anything and I can’t remember the last time I had a drink.

I do confess – I haven’t used a condom EVERY SINGLE TIME I’ve had sex though. 😦

Lucky me – only caught an infection once … LOL – from my wife!!! Well, eventually she became my wife. Infection was easy enough to get rid of.

Something for the New York Times to consider: At some point, keeping clowns and provocateurs around on the opinion page has to damage a newspaper’s reputation.

I guess it’s a balancing act. The Times holds onto a lot of readership thanks to hack columnists like David Brooks, a chronic bullshit artist who specializes in trafficking class and regional stereotypes; Maureen Dowd, who offers little more than an shopworn angry feminist shtick; and Nicholas Kristof, a cutthroat kiss-up who looks like a walking liability for any employer. On the other hand, a reasonable person has to question the underlying credibility of a publication that gives these losers a lucrative platform. Retaining opinion page hacks gives ammunition to a paper’s critics, both partisan and principled. Hacks have the destructive potential to turn an excellent newspaper into a partisan rag. I don’t think the Times is quite there yet, but it seems to be trying.

At this point, Kristof is a monumental horse’s ass. The very idea of white people on the coasts solving Indian alcoholism by boycotting a brewery drips with condescension, ignorance and arrogance. I’d be glad if the Times pensioned Kristof out or just fired him, but in either event there would be an instant firestorm from his very white readership. It would turn into a fiasco that would get mud on everyone’s face. My really cynical side thinks that this might be a beneficial publicity stunt for employer and employee alike, but I’m not convinced that they’re that craven. I try not to assume that people will act like Harvard faculty until they actually do so.

I commented on the music thing on Twitter. It’s such a ridiculous study (or at least the media depiction is). Of course, people who listen to loud music are more likely to do things like drink when they’re listening to loud music in a bar. But loud music isn’t causing these things.

I was reminded of a Mike Royko column from the 80’s. Some bible-thumping preacher was touting a “study” that said that of a thousand women who got pregnant out of wedlock, something like 970 listened to rock music before or during. He was using this to call for a ban on rock music, because its “syncopated beat” apparently rendered women in capable of controlling their raging wantonness. Royko commented that his first instinct on reading it was to blast rock music at the next thousand women he met.

Service to hide Japanese sex workers’ histories and let them function normally: the same things exist in Korea and China. In China, they’re even more impressive.

Many of these services will even create whole background stories for women (and men), including everything from former landlords to jobs to credit histories ro school diplomas, for even higher fees. More of that goes on in China, of course.

When it comes to getting married, in Korea, there are services that will simply erase a person’s history and recreate it to suit. It’s obviously expensive, but using these means many, many women get married and live post-industry lives, often not fooling husbands (who usually know about their wives’ pasts; indeed, they usually met this way) but completely fooling relatives and in-laws.

On the law being modified to stop imprisoning young black men for trafficking:

This is a sacred cow. Anti-racism is more important than women. Racism trumps sexism and gender issues all the time, whenever it comes to a head.

If it means more black men in prison, whatever crime it is, a certain left-wing lobby will oppose criminal sentences no matter what the crime is.

For all the good it does. Blacks still get sent to prison in numbers all out of proportion to their percentage of the population, or the numbers of crimes they commit. At best, it’ll bring some attention to the issue.

Whorish Media

Maggie on Twitter

Boring but necessary legal stuff

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